


In the Basement

by miashay



Category: Dark Angel
Genre: Gen, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 10:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miashay/pseuds/miashay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>494 had to learn to survive Manticore's punishments somehow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Basement

  
There’s no noise down here. Or maybe 494’s forgotten what noise is like. Ambient noise, like birds and the wind and the scraping of feet. No noise. There is no light, either, fresh light, light that doesn’t come from an old bulb, yellowed with time and disuse. Disuse, because no one who needs light has been in the basement as long as 494 has. The monsters, the anomalies, they were content to leave in the dark, their disfigured bodies hidden away. If you can’t see them, they don’t exist. But 494 is X5 and, even though he is a defect, his kind belong in the light, even if it is the harsh, artificial kind.

They want to see his eyes, wide and glossy and empty on his beaten face, still perfect underneath the bruises and blood. He is still perfect, in the quiet with the fake light, in a cell with monsters on either side of him, and they scream and they growl and they beg and 494 hears nothing, sees nothing. The only time he moves at all is when they come for him; manipulate his limbs to drag him from one white room to another. He screams for them, then, bleeds for them, begs, but his eyes stay wide and empty. Everyone knows that 494 cannot be broken, everyone but the doctors in their white coats and their needles and lasers and fists. 494 cannot be broken because 494 is tucked away, in a dark and quiet place.

He dreams sometimes of the basement, but he never knows for sure at first. The place is so still and pitch black and in his head Alec knows that no place on earth could be that still and that black. He cannot move when he’s there, his limbs are not his, and his body feels hard and lifeless, like he was carved out of the concrete pallet he lays upon. He does not dream of hopelessness or despair, or any of those things he knows he feels in his waking hours, when thoughts of Rachel and car bombs and betrayal slip in, unwanted. He feels nothing, like he’s never had a feeling before, no anger, no pain, no sadness, no joy.

Sometimes he dreams of white rooms, of foreign hands and unfamiliar faces. They are taking him apart, peeling back his skin and his muscle and each part of him until all that’s left is white bone and blood. But they cannot find him. When all his organs have been placed in clear plastic containers, and his bones have been grinded down to dust for them to sift through, they will still lift their hands and shake their heads in aggravation. Then they will take all the pieces and glue them back together and take him back, back to the basement, where all lost things go.


End file.
